vanam@pttesac.UUCP (Marnix van Ammers) (07/19/86)
And here's my 2nd posting ... Here's a little problem I ran into. I recently bought some Opus disks. They were only $25 for 10 double sided, double density, 3 1/2 inch disks with a nice plastic case. Pretty soon I started having very odd troubles like getting a little requestor box that said "Disk workbench 2 has a read/write error" or something like that. Well I thought it was due to my buying cheap disks. But the disks seemed to work fine in my external drive. Then I started noticing that every now and then I couldn't write to one of those disks. But still only in the internal drive. Heck. I'll try to make the story short. My internal drive's read/write tab sensor (a little black mechanical thigamajig that feels for the write enable hole (or write protect tab?) must be slightly out of adjustment. The Opus disks are just a tad thinner than my other (Sony) disks. About 75% of the time my internal drive thinks all Opus disks are write protected because the little sensor is able to go down far enough that it thinks it's in the write protect hole even though it is actually resting on the write enable tab. Apparently the OS determines the write enable/protect status when you first put the disk in a drive. If somehow the sensor changes it's mind while the disk is still in the drive, you'll get read/write errors. The OS won't tell you that the disk now appears to be write protected. So the disks are really good, with no read/write errors. Can be very confusing when it happens. Anyway it really threw me for quite a while 'till I figured out what was going on. Rather than have my Amiga in the shop for 2 days to have that arm adjusted or fixed, I have just fattened all my Opus disks with a little masking tape and everything seems to be working fine. By the way I can't get those double sided Opus disks with the plastic case anymore. Now they're only available in cardboard boxes and the price has gone up $5. The single sided ones are available in the plastic case for $25. Marnix A. van Ammers --